Dear Sonic Youth,

First off, thanks for the show on Wednesday, July 15. More or less good stuff all around. I understand you want to focus on your newer material; it is where your heads are these days, and The Eternal is a good album. Though I’ll admit “Silver Rocket” was the highlight for me, and “Shadow of a Doubt” was a nice surprise in the encore. I would have loved a few more tunes from Goo, but I realize that expecting you to play “Tunic (Song for Karen)” was a little far-fetched, like waiting for U2 to bust out “Wire” when they hit up Cowboys Stadium this fall. Nonetheless, good times – though, to be honest, it could have been louder. If you didn’t hear, My Bloody Valentine graced us with their presence earlier this year and thoroughly raised the local expectations for beautiful loudness. I swear you can hear the influence of that show in some of our local acts gigging around town these days, though I may only be imagining it.

Anyway, I wanted to write to you regarding the onstage banter that you engaged us in about a third of the way through the set. To remind you, I believe it started when Thurston said, “Summer in Dallas is like heaven on earth.” Nice line, which was received by muddled groans and few cheers and jeers. Then he asked us, “Where do people live here?” He went on: “We’re staying in a place called ‘Webb Chapel . . . Extension.’” Again, well played. You will notice, it is not very hard to make fun of Dallas, and you were right to then point out that the Victory “neighborhood,” where the House of Blues is located, sucks. The HOB is not a bad place to see a show – it gives us a Beacon Theater, Hammerstein Ballroom kind of venue that Dallas lacks. You may remember a few gigs ago you played the Gypsy Tea Room, which had a more Texas-style dance hall vibe, and conveyed a little more of our local charm. But, alas, the owner bankrupted his mini-entertainment empire. The Gypsy Tea Room is The Door now, and Sonic Youth playing The Door doesn’t make much sense.

But I digress. I want to go back to the bantering. You may have noticed the response to your lines was rather muted. That tells you a lot about this city right there. Sure there was the drunk guy behind me shouting “Sonic Old Guys” (which was idiotic: Thurston, you still look 18, and Kim, you could still kick around comfortably in the fantasies of a 18-year-old). But most of us in the audience sheepishly hung our heads at your comments, taking another one on the cheek, beaten down again by the reputation of this baking concrete wasteland, this suburbanesque sprawl of bad urban planning, automobile idolatry, and seeming spatial pointlessness. At the time I wanted to yell out a response, but I probably would only have come up with something like, “The Annex House!,” or “Since you ask, this guy who produced the White Stripes lives in a house in Oak Cliff!,” or “New York sucks!” But fearing sounding like the “Sonic Old Guys” guy, I kept quiet.

But sill, I wanted to talk about why your comments struck such a chord.

You see, it is not easy living in Dallas. It is not a city with a sterling international reputation. It is not a place that you move to because you have been dreaming about it since your were a kid. When you travel, like when our contributor Joshua Goode recently visited your hometown, the enlightened people of New York ask things like, “Are there any museums in Dallas?” If you travel abroad, Irish guys in English-speaking pubs ask you if you ever met J.R. People from New York wear their city as a tag of identity. Before you know what they do for a living, what they like to do on weekends, or even that they were actually born in Dayton, Ohio, New Yorkers (native or non-) let you know they are from New York.

I know this because I am from New York, and I do the same. When traveling, I tell people I was born and grew up in New York before moving to Dallas. I do this in part because I enjoy the usual, “What the hell?” reaction when I say I defected from New York to Dallas. It offers an opportunity to explain how this city – Dallas – has been so kind to me. But I also have to admit that it deflects much of the usual anti-Dallas snobbery.

Now I’m not trying to be defensive. I just wanted to explain the awkward silence after your “where do you live” comment. We reject and deject this city as much as any outsider. Standing outside the House of Blues Wednesday after the (rather awful) opening act, I witnessed a guy and a girl meet over a cigarette, and before they knew each other’s names they had one basic fact on the table: neither of them was from Dallas. No, he was from Denton, she from Austin. That cleared up, they continued their chat. Last week I was at a show and I met a somewhat flibberty college student who introduced herself as being from Austin though it was later revealed she grew up and was spending her summers at her parents’ home in Richardson (a suburb just north of Dallas). This is all to say, that many of us don’t even like admitting we are from Dallas. Some of us love to talk about why it sucks. Some of us hate it so much we move to New York and start calling ourselves New Yorkers.

But one thing worth mentioning is that Dallas residents have battle scars; they’ve been beaten down by nay-sayers, they have wrestled with their own sense of identity and self-worth for living here, and they dig into the city with bare fingernails trying to make this place work. Many of them figure it out, and grow to like it – even find out when they move away that this place wasn’t so bad after all, and learn to become loyal and proud of it, even if that pride is rarely expressed in that extroverted New York kind of way.

And so, oddly enough, with your question about where we live, you stumbled upon it: we live in an anxious, neurotic place perpetually challenged to explain itself and its own self worth. It is a place where the beautiful noise you guys create – the dejected anthems of concrete life, the overtones of latent-teenage angst, adrenaline-infused depression, the grinding and the pounding that seems stripped from soundscape of vacant urbanity – resonates, perhaps even a little more profoundly than in some well-situated, sure-of-itself, enviable kind of place.